NVidia’s Pegasus: Compact AI computer system to make fully autonomous cars a reality

Nvidia announces its New AI Computer Chip that supports fully autonomous functions of a car!

Nvidia is a graphics chip maker known for providing exceptional graphics for equally amazing video games. While, Nvidia is still engaged in the graphic chip business and have new graphics processing unit (GPU) coming out in 2018, it has also spread out in new and emerging markets. One of their new ventures is in the autonomous vehicles market. At the GPU Tech Conference held in Munich, the chipmaker announced that it had developed world’s first Computer Chip that could provide all the artificial intelligence required for a car to drive on its own; a fully autonomous car. The chipset is named “Pegasus”, after the Greek mythological winged horse. It will be launched in the latter half on 2018Nvidia Pegasus: AI computing system that supports fully autonomous cars.

What does the Nvidia Pegasus chip do?

Nvidia claims that the chip is capable of supporting the millions of intricate computing operations a fully autonomous vehicle ha stop carry out. It claims that the Pegasus supports a fully autonomous, Level 5 car. A Level-5 autonomous car is a fully self-driving vehicle. It requires no inputs or intervention from a human driver in any driving scenarios. It literally means a car sans a driver and also without any traditional driving paraphernalia like the steering wheel, mirrors, pedals, etc. Such vehicles will be empowered by an army of sharp sensors, powerful cameras that will absorb all the surrounding data and feed it to the computing system in the car to drive own its own, safely. To do all this in a lightning speed and accuracy the computing system has to carry out millions of operations at a time and Nvidia claims that it’s Pegasus is capable of performing 320 trillions of operations in a second and much more. The chip is a path of the Nvidia Drive PX platform, the system that is used in an autonomous car to analyze all the data generated. With the help of all the information feed by the camera and sensors, the platform develops a 360 picture of the surrounding and drive the car safely. Thus, Nvidia says that it’s Pegasus can support such a fully autonomous car. The AI computing systems that are currently used consume a lot of power and are too big in size. Whereas, the Pegasus comes in the size of a license plate and are energy-efficient consuming less power.

Huang described Pegasus as “the world’s first computer designed for production and deployment of robo-taxis that help us realise this vision of the future of transportation”.

Nvidia is collaborating with 25 robot taxi companies who will test the Pegasus in 2018.

Nvidia to work with robo-taxi companies

Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia, said: “They [the robo-taxi companies] don’t have Pegasus, they have trunks full of PCs with our GPUs inside, so Pegasus is that path to production for them.”

Shapiro claims that automated cars are set to be the future and quoted : “We see this really transforming transportation in general and ultimately making all of our lives better. Not having to worry about parking, not being stuck in traffic – or if there is traffic, you could be watching a movie or getting work done. Most importantly, it’s reducing the number of accidents and fatalities that are on our roads today.”

Personalized autonomous experience:

Nvidia announce a new SDK called as Drive IX, that allows one to personalize the ride in an autonomous vehicle. “All those type of capabilities, combined with the perception of what the car sees, is going to allow our customers to write applications that are really quite magical,” said Huang. He informed that the cars will be capable of acknowledging customers and make changes according to their requirements. “You will be able to walk up to the car and the car knows exactly who you are and it already adjusted the seats and opens the car. If you’re a passenger, it knows who you are and adjusts the seats and changes everything according to your desires,” he said. This would make your car an AI.